Blog Posts From The Brave Programmer

What's The Most Popular Programming Language - July 2016

Jul25

Written by:2016/07/25 06:04 PM

Java still king of the hill, according to TIOBE index for July 2016. But does it surprise you that Assembly Language has made it into the top 10. Java, C and C++ have been consistent at the top for about the last 10 years occupying positions 1, 2 and 3.

C is showing signs of dropping and might even give up it's 3rd position soon. It seems to have been in a sharp decline since last year.

C# has sliped one position from last year, but is still a strong contender for the best programming language to use. I was quite surprise that C# was eclipsed by Python.

So why should you worry about the most popular programming language. Well, knowing what the latest trends are will help you to know what skills you would need to update and what new skills you might need to invest in. It might also be of assistance in providing knowledge when deciding what technology to use for your next project. This will give you a good indication as to what is available, what others are using, as well as what the long term trends are.

Jul 2016

Jul 2015

Change

Programming Language

Ratings

Change

1

1

Java

19.804%

+2.08%

2

2

C

12.238%

-3.91%

3

3

C++

6.311%

-2.33%

4

5

Python

4.166%

-0.09%

5

4

C#

3.920%

-1.73%

6

7

PHP

3.272%

+0.38%

7

9

JavaScript

2.643%

+0.45%

8

8

Visual Basic .NET

2.517%

+0.09%

9

11

Perl

2.428%

+0.62%

10

12

Assembly language

2.281%

+0.75%

11

15

Ruby

2.122%

+0.74%

12

13

Delphi/Object Pascal

2.045%

+0.57%

13

10

Visual Basic

2.012%

+0.07%

14

16

Swift

1.960%

+0.73%

15

6

Objective-C

1.881%

-1.46%

16

19

MATLAB

1.558%

+0.35%

17

17

R

1.514%

+0.28%

18

18

PL/SQL

1.456%

+0.24%

19

22

COBOL

1.135%

+0.10%

20

39

Groovy

1.125%

+0.80%

From a long term view, looks like Java, C, C++, C# and Python have a strong hold on the top five. So my guess is that one should up-skill on at least three of the top five. Doing that would do you well as a programmer. It might not even be a bad idea to learn PHP and JavaScript as well if you can

Programming Language

2016

2011

2006

2001

1996

1991

1986

Java

1

1

1

3

21

-

-

C

2

2

2

1

1

1

1

C++

3

3

3

2

2

2

7

C#

4

5

6

11

-

-

-

Python

5

6

7

25

20

-

-

PHP

6

4

4

9

-

-

-

JavaScript

7

9

8

7

23

-

-

Visual Basic .NET

8

103

-

-

-

-

-

Perl

9

8

5

4

3

-

-

Ruby

10

10

22

32

-

-

-

Ada

27

16

15

19

7

3

2

Lisp

28

12

12

15

6

5

3

So what is your favourite programming language? Which one do you think people should up-skill on? Which one do you think is missing from this list? If you had a choice, which one would you put in positions 1,2 and 3?